Simon Haydn writes:

Photograph: Laura Aldred and Simon Haydn

The inspiration for these pics created by a custom-made bicycle light came from the latest Tron film, but it was also to capture some unusual night shots of Cambridge before I left the country. I especially wanted some to be taken on the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway cycle track, as it reminds me of a Cyclebahn (or Cycle Superhighway) and would really suit long exposure shots. I personally love anything to do with lighting technology on vehicles, even more so when I can recreate it myself using recycled parts to make myself more visible on the roads.

The light itself was custom-made using eight six-watt bulbs mounted in some plastic electrical trunking and can use different coloured acetate sheets to alter the colour of the light ribbon. It mounts fairly neatly beside the rear wheel, but the battery will only last half an hour or so – more than enough to create the light effects for this project. I'm really pleased with the results, but photographer Laura Aldred can explain below how the pictures were taken.

Photograph: Laura Aldred and Simon Haydn

Laura Aldred writes:

The camera (Canon 550D with 18-55 kit lens) was set up on a tripod in order to take the required long exposures. Setting the camera up in manual mode so that I could use the bulb setting to control the length of the exposure, a cable release was also used to prevent any unnecessary camera shake (other than the Fen wind!). In order to reduce the amount of noise I set the ISO to 200 and the aperture was set to 18.0 as I wanted to make sure that as much of the scene was in focus as possible, especially as the subject needed to be in focus in the whole picture and was moving from close up to the distance.

In order to get different intensities of light, Simon was asked to cycle at different speeds through the exposures. Very intense thick-looking lights are the result of slow cycling with a longer exposure while the fast-looking thinner bands of light are faster cycling and a quicker exposure. In order to get the extra lights from the buses we just waited for one to come along and Simon either chased it or cycled towards it depending on the direction it was coming from.

• Simon Haydn is now a ski rep in Seefeld, Austria, and was previously the Bikeability project officer in Cambridge. Laura Aldred works for Marshall Aerospace.